I hate it when I click on a task bar icon to open up a snoozing application, and a couple of seconds later, there’s a preview of the application showing at the bottom of the screen. I don’t need it as the icon tells me what it is, thanks! Getting rid is easy: Updated 25th February 2021 after Mint 20 upgrade. Cinnamon 20.x Right-click the task bar on a blank space.

With a title like that, I should get some hits! ;-) Note: Updated 6th October 2018 to cover Raspbian Stretch which is slightly different to Jessie. But not much. Note: Updated 8th February 2016 to cover the new Raspberry Pi 3 with built in WiFi and Bluetooth. Note: Checked 20th October 2017 to make sure that the instructions below still apply, and work, on the new stretch release of Raspbian. They do!

The standby database had the RMAN archivelog deletion policy set to ‘NONE’ instead of being ‘APPLIED ON ALL STANDBY’ and the FRA filled up to within an inch of its life, or 99% of its allocated quota! Not a major problem as this database was not in production, but still, an alert is an alert and has to be dealt with. However, things did not go quite as expected. First things first, check the archivelog deletion policy on the standby database:

A process that called ‘‘UTL_FILE’’ was failing in the test system, but worked fine with exactly the same set up in production. Why? The error was ORA-29283: invalid file operation. How do we find out exactly why it was failing? MY_DIRECTORY is a directory, owned by SYS with READ and WRITE privileges granted to a schema that uses it to create, write and read files in that location. The oracle account on the server can create and read files in the directory location, touch and cat prove this.

Running a business, I like to keep a small stock of spare printer ink cartridges, so I usually have a couple of spare colour and a couple of black ones, just in case. However, after a recent cartridge change, one black and one colour at the same time, the printer has suddenly stopped working. This was after about a month of perfect usage, not immediately after the change. The printer is an HP Photosmart 2610 All in one - and now, it’s an HP Photo-not-very-smart-at-all 2610 none in one!

Do I like problems or what? :-) I’m running Linux Mint 17.2 as my host, and I have a VirtualBox 5.0 VM running Windows 7 Professional. I decided I’d like to be able to run the Arduino software from within the VM, but not talking to an Arduino, but to a bare bones setup and programming AtTiny85 devices. The following might be of use to other people’s needs as it explains how the FDTI device cane be automatically assigned to the VM rather than to the host, when plugged in and the VM is running.

I was able to use HPLIP with Mint 17.1 but when I upgraded to 17.2, I had the problem where attempting to run the utility caused nothing at all to happen. The solution: 1 sudo apt-get install hplip-gui Works perfectly for me now.

It appears that the free, introductory Perl course has gone away. The links below are still pointing at the original tutorial, but here’s a free Perl course from Udemy as a replacement. I’m not a Perl developer, I like to be able to read my code after I’ve written it! ;-) However, some people do like Perl and there are even people out there who would like to learn it.

Mum passed away recently. What follows is the full service as conducted by Janet Donnelly of the Humanist Society Scotland. Janet has done a number of funerals for our family in recent years and I’d happily have her do mine when the time comes! We asked Janet for a loyalty card - you know, pay for 9 get the 10th free - but she was having none of it! :-D

Recently I was tasked to do something that I hadn’t done before. I was required to swap out all the existing discs in the two diskgroups +DATA and +FRA, with minimal downtime. Almost all the places I looked seemed to indicate that I had to add the new discs, rebalance, drop the old discs and rebalance again. My colleague, Ian Greenwood, had a much better idea - thanks Ian. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 alter diskgroup DATA add disk -- '/path/to/disk_1' name DISK_1001, '/path/to/disk_2' name DISK_1002, .

Sometimes an ASM instance hangs for no apparent reason and this causes problems when backing up the ASM Metadata. Running queries against V$ASM_DISK and similar views may also hang. This blog post should go some way to helping diagnose the problem, and providing a fix. ASM metadata backups on a couple of our servers had been failing, the backups were run from a system called CommVault and the job scheduler there showed that they simply sat at 0% forever, or would have if we allowed them!

My server rebooted itself and when it came back up, none of the databases or ASM had restarted. Everything is 11.2.0.3 or 11.2.0.1 with ASM being 11.2.0.3 - so Oracle Restart should have kicked in. As usual, any identifying names, servers, domains, databases etc have been obfuscated to protect the innocent. 1 2 3 4 5 $srvctl start asm PRCR-1079 : Failed to start resource ora.asm CRS-5017: The resource action "ora.

Have you ever wanted a quick and easy way of converting all those database entries in your tnsnames.ora file, into something that Toad can use to populate the “sessions” grid? Read on. Normally Toad offers you a drop down list of the various database entries in the tnsnames.ora that is being used, however, if your tnsnames.ora file contains an IFILE entry, then Toad doesn’t follow the included file, and any aliases defined there - or in subsequent nested IFILEs - will not appear in the drop down list.